You said yesterday - tomorrow/Angle Gallery - Maurice van Bakel, Weteringschans 207a 1017 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands Group Show
/17th April to 8th May 2013

Creators:

Murray, Alan

Abstract / Summary:

‘Manuals and Guides’ are a set of four A1 posters. Murray’s pragmatic approach to art making; ‘knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action’ have led to the production of artwork to be ‘used practically’. Murray's practical artwork is in contrast to the work of artists that is either (a) a collection of interesting artefacts or (b) ‘a signpost to interesting phenomena’.

Each of the exhibited posters describe a series of work dealing with a coffee machine, steam irons and a guide to the game of squash. In the early work the posters describe the way Murray proposes intervention and later work is a description of the intervention itself. Earlier work acts as a set of critical statements and later work ‘stops suggesting and does’. The exhibited digitally printed posters are a reflective (re)-description of earlier processes and projects.

The Angle Gallery (Amsterdam) have developed a four-project-series of exhibitions that attempts to historically reflect on the way different clusters of artists made and disseminated work. Project 2, (C//Back up) exhibits artists who ‘turned their back’ on the conventional ways of exhibiting and have sought alternative platforms and contexts.

Although some of the work has been exhibited before (Morphy Richards was exhibited at Victoria Miro and is part of the collection of Museum Dhondt-Daehnens, Belgium) other work is exhibited and published for the first time (e.g. the guide-to-squash).

Murray’s work has developed a user-centred methodology for the way designers and artists should be immersed in a subject to understand and be able to translate and communicate ‘complex information’. The guide-to-squash was designed with the knowledge and experience of an expert translated through a 'beginner's eye' and his blossoming experience. The obsessional amateur becomes the expert.